1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of information processing, and more specifically to a system and method for configuration mapping using a multi-dimensional rule space and rule consolidation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Product configurations implemented in software use product models to define products. Examples of product configuration and product configuration models are described in (i) U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,524, issued May 7, 1996, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Configuring Systems”, inventors John Lynch and David Franke, and assignee Trilogy Development Group of Austin, Tex. (referred to herein as the “Lynch Patent”) and (ii) U.S. Pat. No. 5,825,651, issued Oct. 20, 1998, entitled “Method and apparatus for maintaining and configuring systems”, inventors Neeraj Gupta, Venky Veeraraghavan, and Ajay Agarwal, and assignee Trilogy Development Group, Inc. of Austin, Tex. (referred to herein as the “Gupta Patent”). The Lynch Patent and the Gupta Patent are incorporated herein by reference.
Product configuration model data has been used to determine and correlate product demand data with actual products as, for example, described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/699,148, entitled “Identifying Quality User Sessions and Determining Product Demand with High Resolution Capabilities”, inventor Paul Daniel Karipides, filed date Oct. 31, 2003, and assignee Trilogy Development Group, Inc. of Austin, Tex., (referred to herein as “Karipides I”) which is herein incorporated by reference. The demand data can be obtained, for example, from web sessions as, for example, described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/324,764, inventors Karipides et al., entitled “Generating Contextual User Network Session History in a Dynamic Content Environment”, filed Dec. 20, 2002, and assignee Trilogy Development Group, Inc. of Austin, Tex., which is herein incorporated by reference.
Configuration models can change over time but still relate to essentially the same product. For example, in the automotive context, an ‘old’ configuration model could refer to the color “navy blue” and a subsequent configuration model could refer to “midnight blue”. Midnight blue is intended as a replacement for navy blue but is essentially the same color. When configuration model changes, it has been conventionally difficult to correlate data, such as product demand data, associated with an ‘old’ configuration model with a new configuration model.